I was given a thinkpad with debian woody installed (no billyware). It
boots lovely except for the audio. I get this message at logon:
error while initialising sound driver:
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (permission denied)

you have to leran to use man pages:
if you type
apropos permission
you will a list of suggested man pages:
her ethe good one is
man chmod
In thes very particular, but very newbi, case
you have to ask to the root to put you in the audio group,
type as root
addgroup <user> audio
To see to which group you belong, type as regular user
groups

the sound server will continue, using the null output lines
How do I correct this? (my installation won't let me log into an
xwindows environment as root, I have to do it through a terminal so some
easy instructions would be very welcome)
also how do I browse to my cd rom? It doesn't appear in konquerer and I
don't remember seing it mounted at boot.

man mount

Could someone point me to some easy to understand docs about the file
system, maybe with a graphical representation, as it seems so different
to billyware. I am trying to find java so I can get my browsers to run
applets (I use mozilla and konq).

there is documentation about Java at the Debian site

Finally (for now) is there a reason why I can't copy/paste between
applications? (ie. between advanced editor and mozilla news composer?)

I am a newbie for that too :-)
Please note that your question are not laptop specific,

so the debian-user@lists.debian.org is certainly the place where you
want to ask.